How practitioners communicate with patients about their pain has been overlooked as a factor contributing to effective pain management. Eliciting important pain information from patients enables practitioners to prescribe more specific pain treatments, and significantly decrease pain. The aim of our study is to test the effect of practitioners asking patients an open-ended question about pain that does not encourage a socially desirable response. A posttest only double blind experiment will test how the phrasing of health care practitioners' pain questions, open-ended and without social desirability bias; closed-ended and without social desirability bias; or open-ended and with social desirability bias, affects the pain information provided by people with chronic pain. Three hundred community dwelling older adults with chronic osteoarthritis pain will be randomly assigned to one of the three practitioner pain communication conditions. Older adults will watch and verbally respond to a videotape clip of a practitioner asking the patient about their pain. The clips will be identical except for the pain question asked by the practitioner. After responding to the pain question, all of the older adults will respond to a second videotape clip of the practitioner asking if there is anything further they want to communicate. The older adults will then respond to a third videotape clip asking if there is anything further they want to communicate about their pain. Responses to the three videotape clips will be audiotaped. To control for pain differences between participants, the Brief Pain Inventory Short Form will be administered to measure present pain intensity and pain interference with functional activities. Participants' audiotaped responses will be transcribed and content analyzed using a priori criteria from national guidelines to identify communicated pain information and omitted pain information important for osteoarthritis pain management. The three groups will be compared for the communicated pain information and omitted pain information while controlling for present pain intensity and pain interference with activities. The goal is to identify practitioner pain communication strategies that allow patients to describe pain information important for guiding effective pain management, and to substantiate what pain information is missed when practitioners use less effective pain communication. The results will provide empirically tested communication strategies that can be used in practitioner and patient pain communication education. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]